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The Pretenders

It’s a familiar enough scene: The kid walks in, straps up and does his best to recreate some classic rock song. Maybe it’s the Rolling Stones, maybe the Sex Pistols. He makes mistakes, but still, as he bobs his head and appears to lose himself in the music, he looks like a rock star, and maybe even feels like one. Or he does these things to the extent possible while standing in the middle of a Best Buy, staring at a monitor, playing Guitar Hero III, the video game.

The first version of Guitar Hero appeared about two years ago as a bundled-in extra for the PlayStation 2 game console. On screen, the player sees a standard game scenario: Little dots move down a path; the object is to press the proper button to shoot them. But the dots are (sort of) notes, and the buttons are on the (sort of) fret board of what looks like a guitar. The dot-shooting converts into a guitar line in a recognizable rock song emanating from the game. The first two versions of Guitar Hero reportedly sold about six million copies. A third (costing around $100) has arrived in time for the holiday season — and a battle of the pretend bands is taking shape with a new rival game called Rock Band.

These games fall into the “rhythm music genre” of electronic entertainment, says Dusty Welch, head of publishing for Activision, which owns the Guitar Hero franchise. The category includes karaoke and dance-pad games like Dance Dance Revolution (which involves leaping around on a pad in time to catchy tunes). Originally popular as a party game on the college circuit, Guitar Hero now has a broader appeal. Families play at home, and people compete in karaoke-like contests in clubs. Welch says 30 percent of Guitar Hero players are female, and 20 percent are new to gaming. The music industry has caught on, and the built-in songs are now originals, not the cover versions of earlier iterations.

It’s a little harder to figure out how Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which costs $180 and also has a drum kit of sorts) fit into the context of the actual playing of guitars, which of course has been an enormously potent pop-culture idea for at least 50 years. One person who has some ideas about reality-based guitar heroes is Steve Waksman, an associate professor of music and American studies at Smith College, and the author of “Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience.”

Waksman, who has noticed kids pretending to play guitar in big-box electronics stores, notes that there is an aspirational element to Guitar Hero that’s missing from games likes Dance Dance Revolution. Both satisfy the desire to interact physically with music, and both have a performance element. But Guitar Hero isn’t simply about keeping up with a game: “You’re keeping up with specific songs, by specific artists, who are marked as heroes,” he observes. This meshes with the somewhat contradictory guitar-hero idea, which is hierarchical (the hero is better than you) but also implies more of an invitation to join in (start your own band) than, say, classical music does. That is probably part of what makes the guitar such a potent symbol, even as music making itself has gotten steadily more digital: once an emblem of modern sonic rebellion, the guitar now represents a kind of tradition and a “way of making music that’s more physical,” Waksman says.

Guitar Hero offers a connection to all this, but departs from it in an obvious way: You’re not actually playing the guitar. No matter how good you may get at Guitar Hero, if you decide to take up the real instrument at some point, you’ll be starting from scratch. (The reverse is true as well: Slash, the guitarist of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver fame, recently confided to Conan O’Brien that while he enjoys Guitar Hero, and his actual playing is included in the new version, he stinks at it. “It’s two different animals,” he said.) This isn’t to say that Guitar Hero doesn’t require the steady acquisition of a measurable skill. It does. It’s just not a skill that involves creating music. But maybe that kid at Best Buy isn’t fantasizing about the end of the long and tedious road to attaining musical virtuosity and stardom; maybe, like the controllers of the various warriors and outlaws and strategists whose triumphs unfold in digitally created worlds, what he really wants to be is a great pretender.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 640 of the New York edition with the headline: The Pretenders. Today's Paper|Subscribe